Kathy Burke

In a welcome shake-up of the celebrity-on-celebrity interview format, each episode sees Burke invite a famous friend to bring their best gallows banter and fantasise about their deaths.

She has described it as her “fantasy football” version of death and funeral planning. The likes of James Acaster, Jamali Maddix and Stewart Lee are on the line-up. But the draw is undoubtedly Burke herself, and it’s as sweary and smutty a podcast as you could hope for from her.

I was very clear I didn’t want to do the adaptation. I’d had my time with these characters, and it was time to hand them over.” Graham Norton is quick to explain why he was thrilled to let someone else bring to screen his 2016 bestselling crime novel, Holding. It is the story of a murder in a rural Irish community where everyone, it seems, has secrets that they have been holding on to. “I thought I’d feel weird, but I’ve loved watching the direction the characters have gone in, and the way the world has opened up and got larger. I’ve really enjoyed it.” 

The series will be adapted by writers Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Karen Cogan and directed by Kathy Burke.

Conleth Hill (Game of Thrones) will lead as local police officer, Sergeant PJ Collins, of the remote Irish village of Duneen, West Cork.

A big friendly giant of a man, Sergeant Collins spends his days hiding, eating comfort food and avoiding real police work. But the discovery of local legend Tommy Burke’s body thrusts him into the limelight as he is tasked with solving a genuine case for the first time in his career.

As a society we are obsessed with the pursuit of wealth but our relationship to it remains complex. People can demonise those who don’t have it and sneer at those who have recently acquired it.

Across the two episodes, Burke will meet people from all walks of life to investigate the reasons for this difference in treatment, and attempt to predict how attitudes may change after the current crisis.